People are humans, not vegetables.
When doctors claim someone is in a vegetative state, what vegetable are they referring to? For those of us who have sat by the bedside of a loved one with a brain injury, we must stop the medical professionals in their tracks as soon as they mention the term vegetable. The use of this ugly word seems to give the medical profession the "self-license" to treat the patient as an inanimate object, shuffling them from one inept facility to another.
After Brenna first experienced her anoxic brain injury, the term persistent vegetative state (PVS) entered our world. I knew what the doctors willingly chose to ignore. Brenna was NOT PVS. She was not brain dead and her tests proved that. Her EEG was pretty good.
Brenna did not die as a result of her brain injury. She died as a culmination of multiple institutional acquired infections, poor diabetic protocols, prescription "errors", untreated broken teeth, potassium imbalance, and inept care for a person with a brain injury in most of the facilities where she was unfortunate enough to be.
I spent many hours by Brenna's bed, searching for answers, searching for information the medical professionals chose to ignore and deny. I discovered this 1996 study in the British Journal of Medicine. Why hasn't the United States government funded studies similar to this?
If we as a nation are going to stop using this archaic terminology for human beings, the first step must be with those of us who have seen the miracles of victory over hypoxic-anoxic injuries.
http://www.bmj.com/content/313/7048/13.full
Misdiagnosis of the vegetative state: retrospective study in a rehabilitation unit
When doctors claim someone is in a vegetative state, what vegetable are they referring to? For those of us who have sat by the bedside of a loved one with a brain injury, we must stop the medical professionals in their tracks as soon as they mention the term vegetable. The use of this ugly word seems to give the medical profession the "self-license" to treat the patient as an inanimate object, shuffling them from one inept facility to another.
After Brenna first experienced her anoxic brain injury, the term persistent vegetative state (PVS) entered our world. I knew what the doctors willingly chose to ignore. Brenna was NOT PVS. She was not brain dead and her tests proved that. Her EEG was pretty good.
Brenna did not die as a result of her brain injury. She died as a culmination of multiple institutional acquired infections, poor diabetic protocols, prescription "errors", untreated broken teeth, potassium imbalance, and inept care for a person with a brain injury in most of the facilities where she was unfortunate enough to be.
I spent many hours by Brenna's bed, searching for answers, searching for information the medical professionals chose to ignore and deny. I discovered this 1996 study in the British Journal of Medicine. Why hasn't the United States government funded studies similar to this?
If we as a nation are going to stop using this archaic terminology for human beings, the first step must be with those of us who have seen the miracles of victory over hypoxic-anoxic injuries.
http://www.bmj.com/content/313/7048/13.full
Misdiagnosis of the vegetative state: retrospective study in a rehabilitation unit
No comments:
Post a Comment